Nom De Home

You Don't Have To Be Rich And Famous To Give Your House A Name

Debbie Stuart is known as the tree woman of Lauderhill, having planted some 318 trees on neighborhood swales. No surprise then that she and her husband dubbed their homestead Six Oaks Corner.

Those oaks were among the first plants sunk into the ground when their house was completed in 1979.

"I'm an avid reader, and most of the novels I read have to do with homesteads. Homesteads have names," says Stuart, explaining how her own happens to carry a moniker.

The House of Stuart may not have the grandeur of Mar-A-Lago, the history of Henry M. Flagler's Whitehall Mansion, or the pedigree of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

Nevertheless, it bears a name as proud and picturesque as any given to the baronial manses of the rich and famous.

Stuart was among two dozen readers who called to tell us how they came to grace their domiciles - no matter how humble - with names. Names that conjure storybook settings, names that tickle with humor, names that evoke exotic places.

The sign on the entry wall of Jim Reed's home in Boynton Beach reads Diao Yu Tai.

"It's Chinese, meaning fishing place," says Reed, who for 15 years was a military attache in Hong Kong. "It also happens to be the name of a large official government guest house in Beijing."

Reed and his wife, who is Chinese by birth, had considered another Catonese name that means The Duck Stops Here, a sort of Sino-American pun.

"The reason for that," Reed explains, "is that when I went through Chinese language school, my Chinese name came out sounding like Odd Duck."

Though retired from the Air Force, Reed still has business interests in China, and he and his wife travel there extensively. "I had a career goal of visiting every province in China," he says. "I met that goal last year."

Travels abroad also inspired Toni Solomita's name selection. Several years ago, she and friends were traveling through Italy by car when they stopped for lunch at the Villa Scacciapensieri, "this marvelous garden restaurant on a hillside in Siena."

"It was so tranquil and beautiful," she says, "It was like a little paradise. They served lunch under the trees on a white linen tablecloth. The breeze was blowing, the sun was shining and the food was fantastic. Nearby was a pool in the garden. We spent much more time there than we had expected."

Last year, when she and her husband, Daniel, moved to Boca Raton, she again thought, "This is paradise."And the name Villa Scacciapensieri popped into her head. "It means to chase your cares away," she says. Though a mouthful, the name has stuck.

Sometimes, in the name game, a defining characteristic of the landscape or an arresting element of nature influences the choice.

A mountain stream gave John and Judy Avey of Fort Lauderdale the perfect moniker for their summer home in Evergreen, Colo.

"We call it Rippling Waters," Judy says, "as we hear the water rippling down the boulders and rocks."

Likewise, Ed Thompson had his name the first time he glanced out the front window of his Ocean Ridge home.

"Manu Kai," he says. "It's Polynesian for seabird."The name honors the gulls that gather in his yard daily.

"I just thought they were really cool," says Thompson, who bought the 1920s house seven years ago after relocating from Washington D.C.

Some names represent a play on words, a borrowed image, or some combination of the names of family members.

Del Riconda, the name given the house Jessie and Robert Bright built in Lutherville, Md., some years ago, is made from the last letters of the names of their four children. "I told my husband you have to think up something brilliant and good," says Jessie, who now lives with her husband in Delray Beach.

The firstborn was David, hence the letter D. Joel was the second born, thus the "el."Next was Frederic, "Ric."Add to that the last four letters of the fourth child, Rhonda, and you get Del Riconda. "I thought it was a musical sounding name," Jessie says.

Sometimes a name can make a statement as well as set a mood. Marie Preston Land Coleman detests moving, and when she left a large home in the Rio Vista area of Fort Lauderdale for a smaller one nearby, she vowed she'd never move again.

"The thought of moving was devastating, so I named my house Land's End. I liked the name," she says. "It was my private joke."She was amused that some folks assumed erroneously that she was somehow related to the catalog retailer Lands' End. "They thought I was wealthy," she laughs.

The name, of course, refers to her maiden name, Land, but also, the house is on the corner, which is the end of the block. Furthermore, "There's a place in England called Lands End. It's where the land comes down to the sea. I'm a mile from the sea, but it's as close as I'm ever going to get," she says.

Whimsical or wry, more often than not, a house name reveals more about the personality or humor of the residents than anything about the house itself. Lynne Feinglass of Plantation remembers the house she and her husband Bob had when their two sons were small. "We had a houseful of trucks and toys and balls, and kids," their own and others'.

"I used to refer to our house," Feinglass says, "as Bad Manors."

Roselyn Weisblut, of Margate, had no trouble coming up with a descriptive nom de home for the mountain cabin she and her husband helped build in Danbury, Conn.

"The builder put up a shell, and my husband and I finished off the house together," she says. The work went on for years, on weekends and during summers, and between the births of two sons.